10:03 PM
El DiPablo
Sorry I haven't been writing very much lately. I've been completely slammed at my day job. I'm juggling many different projects, trying to chase down consultants, putting out fires, training new hires and guys who just got promoted, etc etc.
One of the projects I'm working on is setting up UrBackup for full image backups as well as file level backups. We've been using CrashPlan for years, but that only really give us file level backup capabilities. The other day we had a backplane on one of our SAN units take a shit, and we lost connection to our storage for a bit. Luckily everything came back up fine, but I got to thinking what an epic pain it would be to rebuild some of our servers with just the file backups.
So after originally dismissing UrBackup a little while back, I decided to take another look at it. It turns out it is pretty bad ass! I was able to take an image backup of one of our VMWare VMs and restore it to a blank VM in about 20 minutes!
So it obviously worked great with a VMWare VM, but we also use XenServer pretty heavily in our environment. I wanted to test a restore on that as well. That didn't go so well.
You see I was backing up a Windows 2008 R2 VM, and when I went to restore it to a blank Windows 2008 R2 VM in XenServer I got this blue screen of death message!
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| STOP: 0x0000007B |
Oh hell, what is that about?
Anyway, Googling it I found some forums where people say to run the following command in the XenServer terminal:
xe vm-param-set uuid=<UUID of the VM> platform:device_id=0001
Pro tip, that is bullshit. It didn't work at all.
You know what did work? Creating the blank VM using the Windows XP SP3 (32-bit) template!
Once I did that, and ran the restore again, the VM booted up just fine!
I don't know what is up with that template, but it's the one size fits all, never fails template. Plus, it doesn't matter if you are running a 64 bit OS or not!
I once wrote about issues with Ubunu in XenServer and the fix for that was to use a Windows XP template too!
Anyway, if you run into this issue. Try giving the Windows XP template a shot. You can thank me later!
